Posting on behalf of a Mountaineer Leader.

The location of the "Request Leader's Permission" link is very confusing because it looks as if permission is required to be a leader of the trip rather than a participant.

What's more confusing is that the screenshot is from this trip to Lila Lakehttps://www.mountaineers.org/explore/activities/backpack-lila-lake-1, which is not set up to have any any assistant leaders, so one wonders why "leader prerequisites" are shown at all. I thought I might be seeing a different screen because I am a backpack leader, but the screen looks the same when viewed in incognito mode (i.e. not logged in to the Mountaineers site).

I'm posting this on behalf of friend who had set a timer to be able to sign up for this trip when it opened, and had looked at the page many times and concluded that the "Leader's Permission" link did not apply to them. They were surprised when they were unable to register when registration finally opened.

One possible improvement would be to consider "Leader's Permission to be a prerequisite, and to list it at the top of the "prerequisites" section instead of at the bottom. The fact that is says "Prerequisites: None" is confusing in cases where there is in fact a prerequisite to get permission. I know that's not a "prerequisite" in the sense intended by the website (which of course means prerequisite badges) but may be confusing to people who are unfamiliar with website internals.

(1) We would like to add a “Out of State” or “Out of Region” branch option for folks. The reason is that we have~400-500 folks who do not live within a reasonable driving distance from any of our branches, and it makes sense from a reporting standpoint to have an accurate count for membership association, particularly because historically most of these people have been added to the Seattle branch. The need for this is to get accurate reporting and also because it impacts our communications strategies.

(2) We want to automatically subscribe people to branch newsletters. This will be only for instance #3 outlined below: Join or create a guest account? Books, Routefinder & Conservation Currents. The other circumstances you described should remain the same.

(a) For Seattle branch, I’d love for you to determine, based on adding a new Out of State branch option, if we want to automatically opt people in to receive the branch newsletter when they select Seattle as their branch affiliation. We want to add a Seattle Branch List to reduce the confusion when we send out events just happening in Seattle, because right now we pull from a number of different (and old) reports for email sends, and we are getting a reasonable amount of complaints about that.

(b)For all other branches, you said that you could likely automatically have the branch opt-in checked based on their branch selection. We want to keep a list going for all branches, even though we don’t currently send the list for Bellingham.

(c) We want to manually opt people in to all of the branch newsletters now, and then potentially revisit Seattle monthly/quarterly/as-needed.

When you go to try to select a "Guest Family" membership and already have a different type of membership you get the message:

"You are choosing to change your membership from Senior or Adult to Guest Family. Click OK to continue, or Cancel to keep your current membership type."
Could this be added to this message: "Please contact member services at info@mountaineers.org if you would like to include a family member as a guest and are not able to upgrade to a family
membership at this time. We may be able to assist you."

This will support family in all forms and potentially grandparents wanting to include grandchildren could be upgraded for the rest of the year to better include different forms of family and make it easier for kids to be included as guests when someone is already a member, especially with a senior membership which would be very costly to upgrade to a family membership.